No law at all in Deadwood

Imagine, if you will, a football field of standard dimensions. The faculty in Computer Science and Engineering, Mathematics and Statistics, along with a smattering of faculty from other sciences and a few in the Humanities, are sitting in the stands, spectating. The rest of the faculty are crowded together down on the field, wearing football helmets and running into each other at random, over and over and over again. There are no referees.

Such is the electronic behavior of the LSU faculty this afternoon, after geniuses in the registrar’s office decided that all 5000 faculty at LSU needed to be added to an unmoderated listserv. Yes, you read that correctly: an unmoderated listserv. We may never understand how the office arrived at this decision, especially in consideration of the fact (announced proudly on the listserv when it sent its first broadcast this morning) that the listserv would be used infrequently to make general announcements (which we already get through the usual university e-mail broadcast system used by, yes, the registrar).

Every single one of 5000 faculty members has now received several hundred messages containing short little phrases like “sign me up!” later followed by “remove me from this list” and much later by “remove me from this goddamn list you fucking idiots!” (I saved that last one, and I keep rereading it because it makes me happy.)

Something like this happened once on a conference call; I wish I could recall the context, but there were literally hundreds of people involved, at least half of whom were not evidently aware of that fact. And so the first ten minutes were wasted as seemingly every other caller piped in and then announced his/her name and affiliation, to the cascading dismay of everyone else on the line. Eventually, all participants had to be muted so that the meeting could actually proceed.

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10 comments

Fall 1998: The Duke registrar’s office decides that *every*single*student*on*campus needs an email account and proceeds to give them one, with details printed on their registration cards. The IT department, which had built a system for a few thousand people at once, watches helplessly as more than ten thousand people try to login at once.

I am part of a large professional society. There was an unmoderated listserve for a subset of the society (perhaps 1000 people). They accidentally assigned their entire email directory to the list.

They said they figured out the mistake and corrected it less than 30min later, but their email buffer was so full of “please remove me” emails that I was receiving hundreds of them over the next several hours.

Of course, the fiasco won’t really be complete until several hundred participants pick up trojan horse viruses, which then bombard the listserve with ads for penile enhancements and other erotic exotica (or exotic erotica) under the names of distinguished faculty members. Believe me, I know from grim experience (“why is the chair of the state bar appellate practice section sending me all these pictures of women’s breasts?”

This happened a few times when I was working at the IT consulting company Accenture. An all-afternoon global email flood. There would always be some knucklehead in Los Angeles or Sao Paulo or someplace mentioning a get-together at some bar. It would only peter out after some high-placed individual or other threatened any further participants with firing.

Just go to St. John’s College Annapolis during Reality (huge end the of the year party) and play Spartan Madball. There are a couple of rules but they don’t amount to much. No protection, no weapons, and no vehicles. Carry the ball through the soccer posts. Game ends after three points, thirty minutes or three hospitalizations. Ah good fun, though not that listserv that sounds awful.